


Storms

by Misaya



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Breaking Up & Making Up, Established Levi/Erwin Smith, Established Relationship, M/M, Message in a bottle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 16:29:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5877745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misaya/pseuds/Misaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi moves away to take care of his ailing mother, and Erwin is left to fend off the storm of emotion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Storms

**Author's Note:**

> gratuitous (and perhaps incorrect) use of atlantic ocean current patterns
> 
> Listen to this while reading: [Digging Shelters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da7gMOY8bTA)

“Do you really have to go?” Erwin asked. It was the dead of the night, and the wind of the first winter storm was howling and raging outside as though to mimic the tempest inside him. His hand curled around Levi’s shoulder, squeezing gentle as though maybe soft touches would make him consider staying. “Really?”

“Really,” Levi whispered, his index finger tracing swirls and spirals over where Erwin’s heart beat a fast tattoo inside his chest, a measure of his heartbreak. “I asked you to come with me. You said no.” His voice was flat, and Erwin closed his eyes, squeezed them tight shut so he wouldn’t have to see the disappointment scrawling over Levi’s face. “I don’t have a choice, Erwin.”

“I could wait for you,” Erwin offered now, desperate, pleading. “We could wait for each other.”

Levi’s smile was bitter against his chest. “It’s okay.” His words were almost lost between the galloping rolls of thunder that had started to crash in the sky. “Don’t put your life on hold for me, and don’t ask me to do the same.”

Levi was moving back to the UK to take care of his ailing mother, and Erwin hadn’t yet learned how to be selfless.

“Is this the end, then?” Erwin hated how small his voice sounded, weak and pathetic. The wind whipped the fronds of the palm trees around outside, and Erwin wondered if maybe the hurricane that was projected to sweep over Florida and the rest of the southeast would come and carry him away in a rush of noise and oblivion. “Is this the end of us?”

“I guess so,” Levi whispered. His voice sounded near tears himself, and Erwin grasped at him tighter, trying to imprint the physical memory of Levi into his fingertips. “I’ll leave before you wake up.”

One and a half years together spilled down the drain, a whirlpool, and Erwin tried to pry his eyes open for as long as he could, long after Levi had already fallen asleep. But night cast its gentle hand over his brow, and when Erwin cracked his eyes open again, bright morning sunlight was streaming into the bedroom. All traces of the storm and Levi were gone.

* * *

Erwin wandered through the motions of his life in a state of shock; the grief didn’t hit him until about two weeks later. He was shopping for groceries at the local farmer’s market, a practice he’d gotten into with Levi, and he’d been about to turn and ask over his shoulder if Levi wanted this bag of tomatoes or that bag when he remembered. The space behind him was conspicuously empty, and his fingers closed around the ghost of Levi’s hand, hand curling into a fist.

“Sir? Sir?” The vegetable seller was eyeing him warily, and her frantic entreaties jolted him back to the present. “Do you want those tomatoes or not?”

“No, sorry,” he ground out through gritted teeth, placing the mesh bag of tomatoes back on the pile and moving away from the stall. He bought things in a daze, a mess of assorted items that he piled onto his chipped kitchen table in his apartment later with confusion. There was a jar of olives, a crate of mandarin oranges, a string of plump garlic cloves. Stuff that Levi liked to eat, things that Levi liked to cook with, and Erwin buried his head in his hands and tried to will away the tears painting a thick gloss over his eyes. The ennui that he’d been trying to force away over the last fourteen days swamped over him in full force now, and Erwin called in to work, took all his vacation days at once, and spent them wandering around his suddenly empty apartment, trying to remember where he belonged in the mess.

* * *

Everything seemed to remind him of Levi. The man had crawled into each and every one of Erwin’s neurons, had implanted himself so firmly into memory that Erwin couldn’t forget him, even if he tried. He found Levi in a razor he’d left behind in the medicine cabinet, in loose black hairs that he found in the pillowcases, in the way that he always habitually pulled out two cups of coffee before remembering that Levi wasn’t there to drink it.

“It was my choice,” he whispered to his hands, scrubbing the dishes in the sink. He’d already dropped three juice glasses, and their broken shards littered the bottom of the stainless steel sink, twinkling and glistening soapy up at him. “He asked me to come with him, and I said no.”

He repeated the mantra throughout the long days, where the sun shone furiously and brightly in concentrated efforts to be the exact opposite of his mood. Erwin shut the blinds and curtains and curled up with Levi’s pillow hugged to his chest, trying to breathe in the last vestiges of the love he’d given away.

* * *

 

The letter writing started around the same time that Erwin started seeking help through the long, lonely nights at the bottom of a bottle. He would wake up with a crick in his neck, the side of his right hand ink-stained, and empty green bottles littering his kitchen table. Levi had loved wine, and over the year and a half that they’d been together, they’d amassed quite a considerable stock. The sour taste of fermenting grapes reminded him of Levi, and Erwin poured rubies down his throat to burn him numb from the inside out.

He tore up his first few attempts. The letters and lines were shaky, growing increasingly more incoherent as the night wore on, and he sounded desperate. He hated them, and crumpled up his frantic missives and fed them into the guttering flames of bonfires he built on his tiny strip of beach long after all the lifeguards had gone to bed. The waves lapped curiously at the shore and the smoking ashes and Erwin’s feet.

His next attempts were better, the lines and words straight and clear. Entreaties for Levi to come back, confessions of love and soft reminiscings of their time together. Do you remember when we went to the boardwalk fair for the first time? I needed you to stand still in front of the pier for a picture to keep forever, but I soon realized it was impossible to capture the light in your eyes. Do you remember when I needed you?

The empty wine bottles were piling up in Erwin’s recycling bin, and he was too ashamed to throw them out all at once. He tried to sneak a few into the blue bin at the end of every week, but the pile in his house refused to diminish, stacking tall in an empty crate as the letters piled thick on the kitchen table.

* * *

 

The first letter that Erwin sent, rolled up tightly and stuffed into the dry empty belly of a 1989 Chardonnay and flung into the sea, made him feel better. It had been nearing midnight, and Erwin’s head was already woozy with wine. The green bottle had sparkled madly as it splashed into the waves, and Erwin had strained his eyes to follow its glimmer as the ocean carried it away.

It made him feel better, sending the memories on their journey to foreign shores and beaches. He set the gentler memories on their way with a soft whisper, setting them loosely in the wet sand and retreating to the higher ridges of the beach, sitting down and huddling himself in a blanket to watch the tide come in and sweep them away.

Two months later, the last bottle had been drunk, the last letter had been written and sent away into the waves, and Erwin finally felt clean. The emptiness that Levi had left raggedly behind him felt more polished, more subtle, and Erwin could carry the nagging ache like an old friend now.

He had learned to make peace with his wounds, and though he still curled in on himself some nights, Erwin was better. For the most part.

* * *

A month after that, Erwin was browsing through his Netflix suggestions listlessly, clicking away the ones that would have been more to Levi’s taste, and rummaging through a bowl of microwave popcorn. He had just settled on an episode of Merlin that he hadn’t seen yet when an incoming Skype call interrupted the stream.

It was from Levi, and his heart leapt, skittered, banged against the chains of his rib cage that he had laid in place to prevent it from running away from him.

His first thought was that perhaps Levi had accidentally dialed him. The call kept ringing, ringing out, even, and just as he was beginning to relax back into the couch cushions, it rang again. Not a mistake, then.

He picked up, hesitant, begging his heart to stay still.

Levi’s face filled the screen, pale milky light streaming in from the window on his side. He looked as miserable as Erwin had been feeling for the past three or so months, and Erwin ached to reach through the screen and rub away the dark circles that had gathered like bruises beneath Levi’s eyes.

He flipped on his webcam. “Levi?” he asked, tentatively, hopefully. “What’s up?”

Levi’s eyes were bloodshot, something that Erwin could make out even through the grainy picture and somewhat spotty connection. As he watched, Levi scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“I found your letter,” Levi choked out, his words strangled. Erwin’s eyes widened, his mouth dropping open in increments as Levi held up a piece of printer paper that had been rolled up tightly and was spotted with a few dribbles of purple. Erwin squinted, but couldn’t make out the date on it, or what he had written. “Do you remember when I needed you?”

The frantic emotion and wrenching sadness that Erwin had slowly come to peace with howled back into live rawness again, and tears rushed into his eyes as he watched Levi begin to slowly sob on the other end of the call. He was rocking softly back and forth in his chair, his arms wrapped tightly around him in the way that he got when he wanted to keep himself from shaking apart, and Erwin’s arms were achingly empty.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Levi continued, tears in shiny rivulets against his face. Erwin wanted to kiss them away, the tang of salt against his lips. “I’ve been so lost without you. Please come and take this misery from me.”

Three months of agony and trying to convince himself that he could be whole again went down the drain, a whirlpool, and Erwin stayed up into the early hours of the morning jumping frantically back into the storm.

* * *

 

Two weeks later, Erwin blinked, squinting in the bright light of one of the terminals in London’s Heathrow airport. His carry-on duffel was slung over one shoulder, and he shaded his eyes with his other hand as he looked around the gleaming terminal for Levi.

Levi spotted him first. Their first steps towards each other were tentative, wary.

“I didn’t think you would come,” Levi admitted, his voice nearly inaudible over the announcer’s voice on the intercom. He looked small, lost, but he still fit into Erwin’s arms the same way. “I’m so glad you came.”

Levi’s tears seeped into the collar of his faded cotton T-shirt as Erwin pressed kisses into Levi’s hair, the storm coming to carry him away.


End file.
